


Free Falling

by LHasty



Category: Dungeons & Dragons (Roleplaying Game), Original Work
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-04-05
Updated: 2019-04-05
Packaged: 2020-01-05 07:53:41
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 774
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18361784
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LHasty/pseuds/LHasty
Summary: Just some of last year's NanoWriMo prep!





	Free Falling

If there was any one thing that Silefeth knew, it was death.  
It was something she had become intimately familiar with a very young age: her entire village, parents included, had been killed before she'd even been old enough to be considered a 'teenager'. In fact, she was the only one left alive, a fact that had mystified her all of her life. One night, she had kissed her mother and father goodnight. 

The next morning? They were dead. 

Despite her best efforts, all of her investigations, she had never learned why. She had tried, of course, to suss out the answer: books and journals, libraries and any resource she could get her hands on? She consumed front to back, reading voraciously in hopes of uncovering some secret, some answer that would explain the suddenness of the event that had taken the lives of everyone she'd ever known. Nothing came close. Not one book, no elder, nothing had ever explained to her in a way she found satisfying. 

For the longest time, she had been quite certain that no answer would ever reveal itself, quite frankly, and that had disheartened her in a way she could not express. Make no mistake: time healed wounds, and Silefeth had been but a child when the event took place. Over time, it wasn't some sense of revenge or anger that drove her to find a solution. Instead, a deep-seated need to simply _know_ was the one thing that kept her going. It was a need that had taken root in her and never really let go. 

Learning things - especially magic, and its darker elements - became an equally driving force for the young elf. What had started as a search for answers quickly turned into something of an obsession for her. Magic and all that it entailed became something she actively sought out. 

Her life after the destruction of her village allowed such curiosities: the Order of the Gauntlet had come along to clean up the aftermath and, upon finding her, took her in. While she did not feel in the least bit beholden to them, they arranged for her care and saw to it that she wanted for little - within reason, of course. The means to become a wizard were not difficult to achieve, and Silefeth had no little skill in the art of spell-work. 

But it was not until her eighty-seventh year, well within her young adulthood, that one singular event eclipsed that of her village's destruction: she received a missive, requesting her assistance. The request seemed simple enough: a burgomaster - a term she was not perfectly familiar with - requested her help protecting their daughter. Supposedly, the job would pay handsomely - and coin was coin. 

Silefeth thought it a touch odd, in how the courier seemed to know her by name, but stranger things had happened in her life. And the protection of one person did not seem overly concerning. 

It was, in the end, a ploy, a plot, a means to get her where she was wanted to be. That seemed clear when she followed the missive's instructions on where to be and found that she couldn't leave that place. 

But in the end, the journey itself was not, in fact, as important as the destination. Not in this case. Later, Silefeth would always disagree with that little adage. Journeys were shit and all that mattered was what came at the end. What you found at the end of a long winding road was the ultimate treasure, good or bad.

Silefeth knew this, three days later, standing on a muddy street in the rain, one traveling companion dead at her feet, struck down with all of the ease a child crushed an ant. Even that seemed terribly unimportant.

All that mattered, Silefeth thought to herself, was the man that'd killed the half-orc bard, standing tall and broad and pale, eyes like the pits of Hell itself, his expression soft and musing and so handsome as to be unfair about it. 

She knew, just by looking at him, that he was no man - not in the sense of what she'd come to know. No man at all, and all she wanted - despite the blood pooling at her own feet, was him. 

Tall and broad and pale, looking like the lord of all that he surveyed - he was, she'd come to learn - and her wanting Strahd von Zarovich so badly that she could barely stand it. It would be a shame, then, when he cast her off the parapets of his castle to her first death. 

But the dead, Silefeth learned, had a way of coming back.


End file.
